Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

At that moment Laura’s son appeared. I say Laura’s son, his name was Matthew. Laura called him Matt or Mattie. Matthew seemed to spend the large part of the day asleep or else listening to his music with his eyes shut. Laura waved and said, ‘Matt, come and look at this.’ He ambled over without removing his earphones, inspected Laura’s work and gave a thumbs-up. ‘Ace.’

I watched him go. He walked with his hands shoved into his pockets, long and loose-limbed, his hair curled at the back of his neck and around his ears, pale blue eyes with heavy lids which added to the general air of listlessness. Laura watched him too with a slight smile and a look of something like longing, if that doesn’t sound strange, as if she wanted to run after him and touch him. She sighed and turned away.

‘Perhaps your son can help?’ I said.

Laura wrinkled her nose and shook her head. ‘You know boys. I’d never get him to, but Grace will. Grace!’ Grace appeared a few seconds later and Laura said, ‘Come and lend us a hand?’

Grace shrugged. ‘Sure.’

Laura went into the house and left Grace with the tools and the brush. Grace began to pick at the plaster. I climbed down the ladder. ‘Here,’ I said. I showed her how to fracture the plaster with the small hammer, and prise away the pieces with the pick.

‘Thanks,’ she said from beneath her fringe, following the word with the odd little habit she had: the curious apparently involuntary humming.

I climbed back up the ladder. ‘Do you like it here?’

Grace shrugged, hummed, blinked and then nodded. ‘We only just got here. I guess it’s pretty.’ She hummed. ‘There’s not that much to do.’

I said, ‘There’s plenty to do once you get to know the place.’ City kids like her brother didn’t understand entertainment unless it came with batteries.

‘There’s not even a cinema, and even if there was I wouldn’t understand.’

‘No, there’s no cinema. But there is a waterfall and a swimming hole up in the hills.’

‘Really?’ She was so surprised she actually looked directly at me.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will show it to you one day. You will have it entirely to yourself if you want. Nobody goes there.’

‘Where?’

‘Up there.’ I pointed. ‘We will go at the weekend, if you want.’

‘I’d have to ask Mum,’ she said. ‘But I think that would be really cool.’ Then the shyness overcame her like an allergic reaction; she gave a series of tiny dormouse sneezes and returned hot-faced to her task.

Early afternoon a car came down the lane and slowed as it passed the house. The driver craned forward and peered out of the windscreen. From the top of the ladder I saw it was a woman from Gost who worked in the supermarket.

Later the same day we went to the outbuildings with a view to seeing what we could salvage and what we needed to take to the dump. ‘What is all this stuff?’ said Laura as she looked around her.

‘Crumbs,’ said Grace, bent over the box of books; she pulled out a paperback and shook it, creating a swirl of dust, and flicked through the pages, turned it around to look at the back and front covers. ‘I think this is Anne Rice. What does this say, Duro?’

‘ The Queen of the Damned ,’ I said.

She began to pull books out of the box. ‘Gross silverfish! This must be The Witching Hour , the cover is the same. Too bad I can’t understand any of it, I need something to read. Look at this cassette cover! Look at what they’re wearing!’

Laura was on the other side of the space standing near the back wall. ‘What’s this? It looks like a bread oven.’

‘It’s a kiln,’ I said. I moved next to Laura and opened the door. It was heavy and resisted for a moment: inside the kiln was empty.

Against the wall stood a dozen or so pots layered with dust and a stack of boxes. Inside one Laura found tiles in assorted shapes and colours, many of which matched the tiles in the mosaic. She blew the dust from a few and replaced them, carried the boxes to the door to take into the house. The pots pleased her. One by one she lifted them to the light.

Time and rats had got to most of the stuff. We shouldered what we could outside and made a pile in the courtyard: several old suitcases, a large metal basin, an old canvas tent, a clothes horse, baskets — the wicker gnawed in several places, a coffee table with a smoked-glass top, blankets: swollen and stiff, quilts: powdery with mould, a box of plastic-handled cutlery, a bag of unopened envelopes, car magazines: rippled and sealed by damp, plastic sacks of clothing. Some rolls of fibreglass insulation-matting had survived. A container of petrol, half full. Laura took a liking to the old apple press, but it proved not worth saving. Stacks of empty preserving jars and others, a few, filled with bottled fruit, plums. And the rakija . Along with a wooden chair, Laura saved the metal basin in which she said she planned to grow herbs.

When we had cleared — or at least sorted — the outbuilding we carried the rakija and fruit into the house. ‘I’m not at all sure about this.’ Laura held a bottle of fruit up to the light.

‘It will be fine.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘You’re welcome to it.’

‘I’ll take it if you don’t want it.’

‘Have it as a thank-you. Have the other stuff too, the ra. ’

‘ Rakija . OK, but you must try some first.’

I took one of the bottles and twisted the cork. Laura fetched a pair of glasses, I poured some into each. Laura sniffed the contents of her glass and swirled the liquid around the bottom, gazing at it deeply but without confidence.

‘Let’s sit outside,’ I said. I took the glass from her hand and walked down the steps at the front of the house where the sun was low in the sky. On days such as these it was hard to believe in the existence of winter, when frozen snow covers the fields and the hills and the only people who use the roads are the farmers on their tractors. In winter I set traps and occasionally hunt. Days pass when I don’t see another person. In winter Gost is a sleeping beast, which breathes but doesn’t move. People stay burrowed, unwashed, and eventually emerge pale and fleshy, blinking in the light. Then the beast is roused and stretches itself. Come the spring it shakes, and settles. Then summer.

It was the blue hour. Streaks of cloud across a lapis lazuli sky. The hills: three shades of purple, the deepest, a black purple, to the fore, and the palest, almost lilac, to the back with the last of the light behind them. The blue paint of the house shone as did the blue tiles of the partly uncovered mosaic, two blue hands reaching for the sky. In the blue hour things happen. Some creatures prepare to sleep, others awaken. Up at the swimming hole at this time the house martins swoop down out of the sky to dip their breasts in the water. The bats begin to leave the hills. Through the trees the houses of Gost were just visible, no lights for at least an hour; many older people had grown up without electricity and regarded it as unnecessary while there was still a glimmer of light by which to move around. As for the other inhabitants of Gost, they’d still be on their way home. The men would have stopped off at the Zodijak or one of the other bars, the youths convened in the car park of the supermarket, where in the hours between work and sleep they tinkered with apparent endless fascination with the engines of their motorbikes.

I raised my glass to Laura and drank.

Laura did the same, but coughed and pulled a face. It was the same for everyone, you got used to the taste, I told her. Laura took another sip and shook her head. ‘I think I prefer wine.’

Laura gave me all the plums and the rakija , just as she said she would. I left her the opened bottle. There was more than I could carry so in the end I made two trips. The second time I stopped by the pile we had made in the yard and helped myself to several of the cassettes. At the last minute I took the bag of post as well.